City Council postpones Brooks Estate vote on stabilizing structurally unsafe carriage house

Monday

Nov 27, 2017 at 2:14 PMNov 27, 2017 at 2:14 PM

The Council will likely vote on or discuss a request for free cash funds at its next meeting.

Miranda Willson mwillson@wickedlocal.com @medford_trans

The City Council declined to grant a funding request to stabilize the Brooks Estate’s Carriage House at its Nov. 21 meeting after Councilor Breanna Lungo-Koehn invoked Rule 20, which states that a councilor can automatically table a financial request.

Mayor Stephanie M. Burke requested that the council approve the appropriation of $200,000 from the city’s free cash balance to restore or replace some structural elements of the carriage house, including the walls, the stable structure, the roof, the decking, the chimney and the building envelope.

The council will most likely discuss the request at its next meeting.

The carriage house, along with the rest of the historic, Victorian-era estate, is owned by the City of Medford and managed and preserved by volunteer members of Medford-Brooks Estate Land Trust (M-BELT).

Tom Lincoln, Mark Warren and Doug Carr of M-BELT spoke in favor of granting the funds. They argued that stabilizing the carriage now would ultimately save the city money, as future restoration funds might be more costly.

“I’d like you to look at this not as wasteful and not as spending,” Warren said. “It’s more of an investment and has a real return.”

Warren noted that maintaining the Brooks Estate in the best possible condition could attract more people to the surrounding area, thereby helping local businesses.

“If continued in its current state, [the carriage house] is probably not going to last the winter,” he added.

According to Lincoln, the need for stabilization of the carriage house has been discussed by M-Belt since at least 2011, when the group created the Brooks Estate Master Plan. However, the plan was rejected by the City Council in 2014.

“Then-Mayor McGlynn sent the council a funding request for the stabilization in November 2015,” Lincoln told the Transcript. “The City Council held a Committee of the Whole meeting on it, but then did nothing else.”

Earlier this year, M-BELT met with Burke about funds for stabilization, which led to her request last week.

Councilors Frederick Dello Russo Jr. and John Falco Jr. quickly expressed support for appropriating funds to the Brooks Estate.

“There’s a lot of potential to this property. It’s a long-term investment,” Falco said. “But if we own it, we should be investing in it.”

Councilors Adam Knight and George Scarpelli also commented on the historic significance of the estate and the new possibilities that the funds could lead to.

But Vice President Michael Marks said that he would not vote to appropriate these funds until the council received “a full capital plan on the needs of this community.”

“We need a capital planner to address not only this issue, but other issues we’ve been hearing about,” Marks said.

He noted that this was the first time the City Council had heard from the mayor about these funds, and questioned why this property would receive free cash, while other municipal buildings, he insisted, were being neglected.

Carr pointed out that the carriage house is in “unsafe” condition, despite M-BELT’s best efforts to maintain the property.

“We can only take it so far. We need a partner in the city,” Carr said. “You guys have been there for us, but the clock is ticking.”

He argued that the longer the city waits to stabilize the carriage house, the more costly it will become.

Lincoln stressed that other financial needs in the city, while important, are mostly unrelated to the Brooks Estate.

“It’s not our job to create a capital plan,” Lincoln said. “Unlike a police station, this comes with a potential revenue stream.”

While M-Belt plans to apply for funds from the Community Preservation Act, Carr noted that the group will not be able to count on that money because the city will likely receive many eligible applications.

After Lungo-Koehn tabled the motion, she made a new motion to meet with Burke about the Brooks Estate and the funding request.

Only she and Marks voted in favor of the motion, with all five other councilors voting no.